Maneka Gandhi cracks the whip on those trolling and abusing women online

The union minister tweeted on Tuesday asking all aggrieved women to send their complaints to her personal email addressET Bureau | July 07, 2016, 16:50 IST

Union minister Maneka Gandhi has decided to take those trolling and posting abusive remarks online against women to task.

Having taken the initiative, the Women and Child Development minister has decided to take up the matter with Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) and ministry of Information Technology to come up with a mechanism to tackle and punish such miscreants.

The minister has also called upon officials of Facebook and Twitter to seek their assistance in tackling the menace of online trolling. Highly placed sources in the ministry told ET that a team from Twitter have been called to discuss the matter on Friday.

Launching the initiative, Maneka tweeted on Tuesday asking all aggrieved women to send their complaints to her personal email address — gandhim@nic.in.

Till Wednesday evening, the ministry has received over half a dozen complaints.

One of the complainant has emailed alleging that a person has opened a fake Twitter account under Arvind Kejriwal's name and has posted obscene remarks against her.

Another complainant, a Chennaibased IT professional has alleged that her sister-in-law has been posting objectionable comments against her on social networking sites. "This is the worst kind of violence against women where they feel hapless with the barrage of obscene messages/posts. The ministry has decided to take up the matter with MHA and ministry of Information Technology," said a senior official of the ministry.

The ministry has also decided to bring such complaints to the notice of National Commission for Women. The initiative was taken by Maneka after she was apprised of vulgar posts against Bollywood singer Sona Mohapatra and obscene posts by singer Abhijeet against a woman journalist.

The ministry has also written to the Commissioner of Police, Delhi and Mumbai asking them to look into the journalist's complaint and take appropriate action against Abhijeet.